"Haiku, the open source re-creation of BeOS, threatens to become 'The Duke Nukem of operating systems', joked long-time contributor Ryan Leavengood. Actually, after eleven years of development, Haiku still falls four years short of Duke Nukem Forever's long delay, but few other projects have been so long in development. However, with the recent release of Alpha 4.1, Haiku is at last nearing general release." 2013 is going to be very exciting for Haiku.

There's not a whole lot of point if you're just running Qt & Java applications. Linux already does that pretty well. Speed, simplicity, and integration are some of Haiku's main features, all of which are lost when using non-native software. (It's a necessary evil for now.)

IOW, Haiku will never be better at running Linux software than Linux, and becoming something akin to just another distribution isn't the goal.

Well really the reason for QT and Java apps is to fill the few gaping holes... and to run Minecraft at some point in time once kallisti5 gets mesa hardware acceleration working

The nice other features are bonuses in many ways I already like some applications for haiku better than any other. Caya for instance is just great... it still needs work but its just plain awesome combined with Stack & Tile windoing